The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven, open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are formalized in the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. It is complemented by the MEI Guidelines, which provide detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model and best practices suggestions. Read more …
MEI is co-hosted by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, and the RISM Digital Center, Bern.
If you want to become an active MEI member, you are invited to read more about the MEI community and how to join us. You are also invited to contribute to the development of MEI on GitHub, either submitting issues or making pull requests to solve these issues.
Posted Aug 25, 2026
MEC 2027 will take place 7 June - 10 June 2027 at the German Historical Institue (Deutsches Historisches Institut) in Rome, Italy. In support of the conference, the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra is acting as a partner and an additional venue. The Local Organizing Committee Chair is PD Dr. Vera Grund and Program Committee Chair is Prof. Dr. Johannes Kepper (Universität Paderborn, Germany).
Posted Mar 19, 2026
The MEI By-Laws have been updated to reflect the revised language about Institutional Memberships in section 3.1.2 that was voted on by the membership. Learn more about the three levels of institutional membership: Regular, Sponsor, and Patron members.
